Citizen Science – Page 10 – The Hermits' Rest

Who Am I?

Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.

Well, I’m glad I don’t hide who I am on this blog, or this would be more of a challenge. No doubt I e answered this before over the years, but here I go, in case anyone is at all interested.

Sue Ann means “graceful lily,” according to name books’ etymological declarations. I am pretty damned sure my parents didn’t look at my round and wobbly baby self and name me based on that.

No, after a couple of days of indecision, they named me after two of Dad’s sisters. Of course, as the Kendalls tended to do, they gave me their middle names. I’m glad. Bettye Doris is a mouthful. Bettye went by “Pug” all her life and Doris Ann went by both names, or either, randomly.

Suna came from an existentialist Japanese movie (and book by Kōbō Abe) that affected me deeply. It was called Woman in the Dunes or Suna no Onna (砂の女). Suna means something like grains of sand, which I metaphorically interpret to be like all the different facets of oneself. The idea of being fluid yet solid, like sand, stuck with me, and so when the time came to choose my own name, that stuck. Like sand on the beach.

I used to be quite the little gloomy existentialist intellectual in the olden days.

By the way, Suna is a given name in other cultures. The source I saw says it’s a female Turkish name meaning “duck.” The cute kind, I’m sure. Ah, upon further reading, it means beautiful and tall, like a drake. I guess since male ducks are prettier?

I saw a lot of ducks today, along with white pelicans, along the Cooper Lake dam.

Or it could be gold, from a Sanskrit word. In any case, a hint of my love for the name comes from the fact that it’s much less beautiful backward. Ha!

I’ve driven that topic into the dirt (another sand reference?) so let’s move on. Today dawned cloudy and gusty. Hiking in that weather is not fun. I did try, and got a couple more plant photographs and bird sounds, but checking the forecast led us to head home sooner than planned.

Rain is forecasted for tomorrow, and Lee didn’t want to take Seneca the motorhome on back roads in bad rain. So we visited the park office, where buying a magnet was quite difficult, then headed out.

This pretty stand of yuccas was one photo I was glad to get. The only ones I saw.

It’s an interesting drive from Cooper to Cameron if you avoid the interstate. There are lots of horse farms (yay) and lots of this kind of thing (ugh).

Proudly declaring to the world he’s Suna backwards.

It was good to be home and get caught up with things back home. It can rain all it wants to now!

A Dream Job That’s a Walk in the Woods

What’s your dream job?

My dream job has changed over the years. If money were no object, I’d teach knitting and crochet part time. I don’t want to be a famous knitting guru like some of my friends; I just want to bring the joy of a lifetime pastime to others. It’s so rewarding.

The temperature blanket for this year is so fun and has purple in it! Cool. Literally.

Nowadays, though, I am getting so much from my time out in nature that it would be a dream job to be a park interpreter. I could lead walks and hikes that show folks how ecosystems work, what plants and animals there are in different habitats, and how to identify what they see, hear, smell, and touch.

I could lead a hike here and show folks all the future wildflowers in midwinter.

I could also teach hiking etiquette. Like, don’t bellow at the top of your lungs and sing rock songs so loud you scare all the woodland creatures for miles, which is what the only other hikers I saw today did. Ugh.

Anyway, we’re enjoying a very peaceful time at Cooper Lake State Park. We are the only people here who don’t work here. It’s glorious and peaceful, probably the quietest state park we’ve been at. Someone was shooting something somewhere nearby and it was SO loud with no other noise around.

It was really cold last night here in northeast Texas, down to 20°. We got in late, and the heater just couldn’t cope. It got down to 58° inside, but I slept so well. Quiet. Once the sun came out, the heater coped and tonight it’s fine.

Because it was sunny and there was no whipping gale wind, it actually wasn’t too bad outside, and I was able to go on a couple of nice walks around this huge lake and the hardwood forest around it.

There were ducks, herons, a cormorant, gulls, greater yellowlegs, belted kingfishers, and more on the lake shore.

The bird highlight for me was getting to see a golden-crowned kinglet close enough to see that little crown. Theirs are way easier to see than ruby crowned.

Woodland birds included lots of crows, blue jays, cardinals, robins, and woodpeckers. The most popular tiny bird was the yellow-rumped warbler, but there were plenty of titmice, wrens, chickadees, and sparrows. Two nuthatches also showed up. Lots of singing and flitting to enjoy. Who cares about the cold!

You could see all the wildflowers and grasses in their winter resting states. There were colorful leaves and berries if you looked carefully, though. I found it fun to try to figure out what the dried flowers and bare trees were. I’ll see how well I did when I put them in iNaturalist.

What didn’t I see? Insects. Not one butterfly showed up. No bees or flies. They’ll be back soon as it warms up again. The little insect-eating birds like phoebes and mockingbirds were busy with other food in the meantime.

I could do this observation stuff for a living with other people! However, wow, it’s nice to do it alone. Traveling without the annoyance of other humans sure is pleasant. I prefer this to cities.

To wrap it up, here are some fun pictures of tracks I found along the lakeshore. There are herons, ducks, little birds, raccoons, and a canine. I didn’t see deer tracks, but I did see deer, so of course they are here!

Fun on a Rainy Day

We were afraid we wouldn’t get to do much today because it was supposed to rain a lot. So I did my nails and relaxed this morning, but I really wanted to do something outdoors since I’m here in such a pretty part of Texas.

Lee opined that we could at least go for a ride so we traveled along the Devil’s Backbone and looked at lots of scenery and lovely ranches. E stopped for coffee in Wimberley, where of course I was not encouraged to get out and buy any art or boutique items. Hmph.

On our way back we really took back roads and hugged the lake. It stopped raining, so we got out and explored one of the boat ramps on Canyon Lake. All the ramps are closed however. The lake is only 60% full, thanks to the dry summer, so the docks end on rocks and shells of evil Mediterranean clams.

I had a great time finding new plants and familiar ones in their winter disguises.

This is apparently *Pediomelum latestipulatum* or Texas Plains Indian Breadroot

Mostly though, I enjoyed the sounds of many water birds that were on the lake. There were gadwalls, coots, mallards and the wigeons, which make such cool sounds. I saw a kingfisher and a kestrel, too. We had a great time.

Gray lake with ghost trees. There used to be a town under the lake.

I found things blooming and growing amidst the grayness.

The ride home was fun. We found a whole area with houses made of shipping containers, which were very creative. There were many other fun houses along the lake ranging from old to new and small to huge. Plus there was a lot of wildlife. We saw a beautiful fox (no photos, but it had a gorgeous tail) and many lovely deer.

After enjoying football we are ready to head back to the animals tomorrow. I look forward to coming back to this area in the fall for the Master Naturalist annual meeting if not sooner.

We are at top left. Renovated room but not very comfy. Great staff, though!

Odd Bucket List Item

Today we’re in a condo in the Canyon Lake area, because we needed a break and have a horse sitter for a few days. Apache must have his diva needs met. Of course, I had deadlines and video calls to do, but we managed to get me out in nature.

I don’t have to work until January 2, so I’m ready to relax and catch up on things…after a couple of relaxing days. I think just maybe things might be settling down at home, which will help us all deal with whatever changes come next year. We can flow like a river.

Like the Guadalupe River, to be precise.

I started my day walking around the extremely large condo complex and trying to find nature. There was a woods next door with sleeping deer! Well, I woke them up. And I enjoyed checking out the nice mini golf course with a view of Canyon Lake. It was a good reward for finishing my release notes.

Later we went over by the nearby dam that created Canyon Lake to enjoy the views and see what lives there. I saw some American wigeons swimming around, plus some mussels. There were even a few new plants, but I didn’t find the rare Canyon Lake madrone Lee always talks about.

Later we went to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant. The food and service were both superb. I had fish with Alfredo pasta and veggies, and Lee said the chicken he ate was the best he ever had. It was served with beautiful homemade ravioli. And it wasn’t even very expensive!

After more meetings for me, we went to the nature trail on the other side of the dam, along the Guadalupe River. The trail is maintained by the local Master Naturalist chapter, the hosts for our next meeting. I wonder if this trail will be a field trip? They’ve made a nice guide with numbered markers to tell folks what they’re seeing. I’m impressed!

I tried to listen for birds, but the darn rapids made it hard (the rapids are wonderful, of course). Eventually chatty people, crying babies, leaf blowers, and small planes stopped long enough for me to hear many woodpeckers, wrens (including canyon wren!), and a kingfisher. Of course the normal songbirds were there, including an extra friendly Ruby-crowned kinglet and a very dedicated ladder-backed woodpecker.

It was fun to spot springs, ducks, ferns,cypress, and pecans. I love me a riparian area! This river really is one of Texas’s gems.

So, what was the odd bucket list item I referred to in the title? Well, I’d seen most of the places where Lee has lived, except for one, which was a rustic camp area near Canyon Lake. He drove me through the area and I got to see the driveway he had worked on. It appears that whoever owns it now is building a real house there. Now my bucket list is complete!

Just a pretty old Ashe juniper with a red oak sprout.

In the Woods, Always

When are you most happy?

I like this question, because it ties in with what fun I’ve been having lately, including last night. In the past year or so since we started camping and I got in the habit of going outside to do some of my meditation, it’s become very clear to me that the woods bring me great joy.

The old willow tree by the spring in our woods.

I’ve had so many fantastic experiences in the woods these past months, where I find myself all alone with my heart swelling and a huge smile on my face. Yesterday when I heard the huge murmuration taking flight, when I found a nightjar sitting in a tree, gazing at the huge oaks and elms, watching deer and armadillo grazing with no fear. Ah.

I loved watching this doe earlier this year

Last night I had another magical woodland experience. I attended a solstice party at a home in the middle of a dense woods. I felt so at peace there from all the good energy and loamy scents.

Just a glimpse into the nighttime woods.

We wandered beautifully designed paths through the trees near the house, where there was gurgling water and other animal and bird habitat.

This may look like mud, but it’s part of the gurgling water that keeps our woodland happy.

We enjoyed a huge bonfire and honored the return of the light by gazing at the moon surrounded by a halo. It was wonderful to be in the woods with friends, since I’m usually alone. By the time the evening was over, I was practically oozing contentment. I’m glad I got a nice big dose of forest energy. I left with much more holiday spirits than when I arrived.

Nothing better than a good solstice fire.

When are you most happy?

Yuletide blessings to all of you readers! Here are some bonus pictures for you!

She Cares

Tell us one thing you hope people say about you.

I’d love it if people said about me that I cared about others. Other stuff, well, we look different to everyone we interact with.

And sometimes I look goofy. This is me and my friend Phyllis pretending we’re eagles, because for some reason we were given eagle pins for bring Master Naturalist past Presidents.

I did manage to gussy myself up enough to approve of my hair and outfit for the party I was at this evening. As always, the Master Naturalist holiday party was fun, and it sure was nice to have it in one of the buildings our family worked on.

I enjoyed all the awards and recognition for people who worked so hard the past year. There were some heartfelt thanks for long-time officers who are moving on to let others do their jobs (some quite happily), and lots of happiness with new volunteers. I’m still the secretary, but enjoyed getting my eagle pin for being President, since I did it during COVID.

Alan is telling us why we are bald eagles

There were two things that touched me. One was that Catherine, who has commented often here in the past, gave me a beautiful old copy of O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. She said Cather reminded her of me. This is a book I’ve always meant to read-read, since I first read it when I was very young and don’t remember much except there were Swedish people in it. What a nice gift.

The second one was that I got the WOW iNaturalist award for the month from Linda Jo, our iNat cheerleader. It was for all the observations I got in the Pollinator BioBlitz in October. I didn’t think anyone had noticed that I did really well in it, but she did. I felt so good!

We did the Yankee gift swap thing as usual. I got my gift by stealing. It’s a cute glass birdbath I can use by the pool. My favorite part of the gift was a wooden dove that says “peace” that was part of the wrapping. Photos later.

I sure enjoyed my time with the generous and talented friends I’ve made in this program. I hope they know I’m saying nice things about all of them.

Reading? Of Course!

What book are you reading right now?

It’s a good time for that question, because I started a new book a few days ago, The Invention of Nature (2015). It’s about Alexander von Humboldt, whose work was very important for people like me.

I have it because folks were discussing naturalists and people who have a lot of species named after them. It became apparent that I wasn’t very familiar with von Humboldt, compared to Aldo Leopold. So, my friend “JC Maxwell” (a pseudonym) said she’d send me a book.

Sure enough, it showed up, along with a book called Regretsy, a humorous look at awful things sold on Etsy. I admit I read that first. It made me laugh aloud.

The author tells funny stories about herself, too.

Back to Humboldt. So far he’s still pretty young, but he’s been running all over Prussia and its neighbors being an eccentric genius and meeting famous people. I guess that’s what you did back then. He seems to have had a lot of time off from his job looking at rocks in mines.

Right now he’s hanging out with Goethe and the king of some small chiefdom or whatever it was before countries emerged in central Europe. They eat a lot and discuss poetry and new ideas about how the natural world works. Plus, of course he knows Charles Darwin.

I’ll get to the parts where he goes off and identifies lots of plants and animals soon enough. Right now he’s just way over-studious and energetic.

Did you know in the 1800s he was the most famous person in the world? That’s what the book says.

Today was full of chores, but Anita and I had fun grocery shopping for Thanksgiving at her favorite H-E-B store. We also visited Target and a couple of other places.

I still got home in time to horse around with Drew, who calmed down a bit today. All good.

Daily Bird

Today I went out on my usual morning walk and animal inspection. I heard an interesting hoot/honk sound. I looked down at the Merlin app and it said snow geese! Sure enough, they were flying over.

These guys are only here during migration, so I was lucky to get a glimpse. We saw tons at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge in New Mexico when we went there. Beautiful birds.

Introducing Today’s Bird

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. I’d like to share the most interesting bird I come across every day, or most days. Since I’m learning so much about birds lately, why not share? Usually I’ll just stick a bird paragraph and photo at the end of a normal blog about horses, dogs, plants, or whatever. Today I want to share two, though, so that will be all the blog (oh darn, you’re saying, what about today’s bur adventure in which Suna got completely covered in them?). No one cares about that.

Yesterday’s bird of the day made me very happy. I heard and saw my first Harris’s sparrow of the year. In my opinion, they are the most dapper of sparrows, with all the black on their heads and pretty white edges to their wing feathers.

Their song is quite distinctive and loud, so once you know what a Harris’s sparrow sounds like, you can find them. The first time I spotted one was when I was wandering around in Sara’s pasture looking for sparrows a couple of years ago. I managed to get a blurry photo to ID it with, and afterward I was on the lookout! They are so pretty!

I think I’ve mentioned before that they’re one of the last winter sparrows to arrive. It’s no wonder! They come from practically the North Pole! It’s cool that they only live in the center of the US. There are very few advantages to being here, bird-wise, so that’s cool.

Things I’ve learned about them:

They are the only bird that exclusively breeds in Canada.
They like fields near water. This explains why we see them, since we’re so near the creek.
They hang out on the ground out in the open more than a lot of sparrows (well, not more than Savannah sparrows).

The Daily Bird for today is the Barred Owl. Today I finally got one recorded on Merlin, so it’s on my “life list” there (though I’ve been familiar with them since I moved here). They are gorgeous birds and I love listening to them go “who cooks for you?” Over and over.

These birds have some interesting habits. They love to nest and hang out in abandoned buildings. How did I learn this? Well, after we bought the Rattlesnake house down the road, we didn’t mess with it for a while. Finally, we brought our contractor at the time over to look at it. All was well until we went upstairs. When we entered the main bedroom there was a big noise, lots of feathers rustling, and there was a barred owl, not happy to see us. It expressed its opinion by letting loose a very large stream of owl poop as it flew off. Yes, we scared the poop out of it. Fun times.

I’m not always so fond of them, since they ate all my chickens when I was caring for the ones over by the cabin where my son lives now. Not fun times.

Things I’ve learned about them:

They are also called hoot owls. I always wondered what a hoot owl actually was.
They don’t migrate. We’re on the western edge of their range, though they have spread further in the northern US.
Their biggest predator is the great horned owl. Grr. Leave my owls alone.

Better Days Do Come

Sometimes when you have a long string of anxious and worried days, it’s nice to have one that builds you up. I hate it when I’m dealing with annoying physical symptoms and I’ve done all I can to get my equilibrium back, but the truth is sometimes I just have to wait it out. Today helped!

I got to enjoy what passes for fall color in College Station Today.

Penney woke me up by wigging and licking like crazy for about an hour, so I got up, looked at the damp day, and did my nails with a set I’d looked forward to using, which looked like a brocade cloth with big flowers on it. It didn’t go on really great, but it perked right up when I added some gaudy jewels I had hanging around. Now the whole thing looks over the top, but it cheers me up.

After talking to the chickens, I headed over to the place I got them, Bird and Bee Farm, where our Master Naturalist wildscape project is located. I rarely have time on their special days to get out there, so I was glad I had a while to drop by.

I’d intended to take photos of all the butterflies, but it was still too damp in late morning for them to be out. Even the bees were still napping.

My friend Debi and I looked at all the flowers and found lots of caterpillars and a cat.

All these black ones came up as salt marsh moths

It was so pleasant just wandering around and seeing what is still hanging around this time of year. The dew was so heavy that it made for fine photo ops. It’s nice to photograph non-wildflowers like roses and zinnias occasionally

I hung out with birds a bit, and heard a new wren on Merlin, a sedge wren. I wish I’d seen it because it sure looks cute in its photo online. Instead, here are turkeys.

After talking a while with other Master Naturalists, I had to leave. I hope Patsy notices I put my nails in the blog for her.

The reason I had to leave was that I had my second watercolor class at Brazos Watercolor Retreats in College Station. We learned to paint trees with sunlight pouring through them. There were lots of new techniques to learn, like making white space by putting some rubbery stuff on the paper before painting. I also learned to make the sun rays.

I didn’t do a great job on the tree part, but I know what I’d do differently if I tried again. For a first try, I’m fine with my finished product. Maybe I should get some paints, brushes, and paper. It’s fun to see how the colors come out.

I even made it home in time to feed the horses before it was too dark, which makes it a lot easier to give Apache his medicine. They have a new bale of hay, and judging from the holes in the wet ground, they had a good time running around after they escaped while the tractor was going in. Those little dickenses.

So, yay, today has been fine enough that I’m handling learning about a few deaths in my circle pretty well. I have plenty of energy to send out love to all the families and friends, which feels really good.

Hug a loved one.

Work Hard. Get Rewarded.

It’s not often that your hard work gets tangibly rewarded. For my paying work, knowing I’ve done my best and that what I’ve done may help someone is enough. This week I’ve been quite satisfied to get a lot of that kind of work done.

Some hard work feels very unrewarding, but must be done. I’ve suffered through a lot of financial work this week, which may explain while I’m still having anxiety chest pains. But I’ve trimmed some expenses and added money to my 401K. That’s the direction where I want to go!

But tonight I did get a reward. Last week I attained 1,000 volunteer hours with Texas Master Naturalists, which was not easy while working full time and owning horses. My friend who also got the achievement took two fewer years than me! I’m proud of Eric, though. He does great work.

My reward was a gold dragonfly pin. I got bronze for 250 hours and silver for 500. It will be years before I get another one!

So many pins. The colored dragonfly is for initial certification. The enamel pins are for at least 40 volunteer hours and 8 training hours each year. The bottom pins we got for sticking with the program through COVID.

It was nice seeing a full house at tonight’s meeting, with three visitors, even. We enjoyed a great presentation on lichen, where I learned a LOT. I apparently knew very little about lichen. Did you know they are a symbiotic combo of a fungus and algae? And they have a fascinating structure. Now I want to buy a black light flashlight and go out and see which ones glow.

We are getting good rain again tonight. That’s so good for the ponds. It will probably knock those few autumnal orange leaves I found today down. It’s ok. I see birds better that way.